Hi, I have been an listener of FDR for a couple of years now (atleast 3 I think :P) and it has help me immensely with becomeing something I don't hate. My life haven't been bad from the pov of parranting even though my mother is a narcissist as I understand it my father has always been more than I feel I diserve. I belive thought that I have had a bit of an unusuall path towards Anarchism and self-knowlege compared to most. I'm I Swede by birth so I grew up in a heavely sociliast society wich basicly have had until now a belife that everything can be solved by increased taxes and regulations. And considering that homeschooling is illegal without special permision that basicly gets hammered in to you through you school time.
I was a highly inteligent child and in a cuntry that created the word "lagom" (a word that isn't easy to translate to other languages but is roughly "good enough you reached the norm") school was basicly geting told to either wait for the other kids to catch up or do the schoolwork again I got pretty much fed up with school at an age of 10 or 11. I also was abit of an "shy" outsider in school and I basicly moved along with the crowds without acully bellonging to any of them. I quite early in my life learn that I as an emotional person was open for attacks as empathy and showing of fellings other than anger and distain was not part of the norm how a male child show be in my youth ( this was not a bad area I grew up in socially but middle-class upper middle class). So I started to actively at an age of 12-13 learn to "turn of" my emotions and started to watch a lot of gore and snuff movies to "sanitice" my emotions to better fit in, this devestating choise have left me unable to cry since the age around 16-17 (I am 26 at the moment of whriting this post.) and I still have a increadible hard time to connect emotianlly towards other people ( but strangely enought not animals)
At the age of 14 I was starting to get dissolutioned with society at large and as a free-thinking indedendend youth I ofcourse got together with the biggest politicly incorrect group in my area wich was the local skinheads (not the political kind at the start), as I had been heavily indoctrinated through school and society at large that the state was the only thing that held back the human evils I ofcourse came to the conclusion that we had the wrong type of state not that the state itself was the problem. This resultedt that I 2 years down the line was involved in National Socialism and an organitation that inovled some of at the time most dangerus criminals in Sweden. I soon became troubled by the flaws and obivius false facts of the idiolegy but as this was the first time in my life I had felt camradery and met older people I thought listen to and and respected me I tried to recompence the problems much like religious people do. It took me to the age of 19 to get out of the organisation and away from the people in it.
The thing that got me out of it was that I met people that chared my other intressed at that time (ironicly in the Swedish army) wich was my intreset in music and science and philosify. And for the first time I stood with a clear example that there were people willing to accept who I was for what I was and not because I regurgitated the group mentality. I was the turning point of my life when I started to shed away all the layers that I had created to fit in and started to build on what was left of what was me at the core, and I vowed that day that I was going to live my life as I wanted it not as I thought other wanted me to live it.
I started to get my eyes up for anarchism at the age of 21-22 and was making big steps forward intellectually but emotinaly I was still at a dead end I had put my self in at my schooldays, around the age of 23 I found FDR through my friend I met in the army and starded to listen because of the political part but soon got engrosed by the parts around personal growth, and I started to see that I was very wrong about alot of things in my view of myself. I had up to that point kept the view that emotions was a flaw in humans and intellectuall coldness was the striving point, that I was almost 24 and still a virgin and never had a relationship with a girl I just thought was because of that I was unatractive and too inept at the social game at the "meatmarket". Not that I was emotianly dead and radiated an aura of hostility to people around me as soon as it was about emotions and relationships.
With what I learned from FDR I started to open up and got the currage to show myself to others, and a year later I met my first girlfriend, I also started to talk alot about my feelings with my two closes friends (one who I was charing an appartment with). That I started to talk with my friends probebly saved my life as I was still going head-on in to depression at that point as I just bottled up all my feelings and pain up too that point.
Today I have a girlfriend that I care alot about and I live in a apartment I like with I job that I have no problem with untill I figure out I what I really want to do, but in the last months I feel I have started to laps back in to a quite dark depression, I have for the first time in many years started to remeber my dreams and none of them are plesant with in turn have given me trouble to sleep when I am alone. My dreams are almost of an lovecraftian model and always with the feeling of unexcapeble doom for me. I also feel that there is something in my core of being that I am afraid of and dare not touch. I have still untill this day not been able to say that I have felt love towards another as far as I can rember.
I haven't dared to talk about this with anyone yet, as I feel I don't want to be a burdon to others but I fear more that I am lapsing back to my earlier years were I was just going through a grey mist waiting for death to relese me from a bleak pointless existance. As I finish whriting this post I am just sitting here with a pain in my chest wanting to cry but unable to alow myself to do it, all the earlier escape path for me have now lost their attraction and I am left with an terrible empty feeling worthlessness....
"A good friend will come bail you out of jail, but a true friend will be sitting next to you saying...'Damn, that was awsome!'